Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe

By Donald R. Burleson

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) has been described variously as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe, a master of the Gothic horror tale, and one of the father of modern supernatural fantasy fiction. Published originally in pulp magazines, his works hav

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813182612

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Preface

During the 1970s and 1980s, a notable amount of literary criticism began to appear on the Providence, Rhode Island, writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Most of it belongs to such schools as formalist, Jungian-psychoanalytic, and mythic criticism. Though the present study is from a very different critical perspective—that of post-structuralist or deconstructive reading—the purpose is not to minimize the results of previous criticism. Formalism, for example, provides insights that are scarcely to be ignored. Rather, the purpose here is to look farther afield with the texts, to submit them to particular kinds of close readings that extend previous conceptions of their literary depth and show how enigmatic, as creatures of language, the texts really are. No one until now has applied the strategies of post-structuralist thinking to Lovecraft’s writings, and I believe that those writings will loom all the more significant as these strategies are brought to bear on them. With the late Paul de Man, I believe that literary texts are literary precisely to the degree that their figurality encourages the protean encroachments of deconstructive reading. My particular point of view concerning post-structuralist theory and critical technique, together with a general discussion of the nature of deconstruction for those readers not intimately acquainted with the subject, is described in chapter 1.

When choosing which Lovecraft texts to explore here, I felt much like a small child visiting an ice cream parlor that offers several dozen flavors. One is tempted to pig out and eat them all—much as Lovecraft, in the company of friends, once literally did in an ice cream parlor in downstate Rhode Island. But such indulgence would have the usual inflating effects, alas. Deconstruction is an open-ended, generative process, capable of producing considerable commentary on any particular text, and one must practice a certain reluctant economy. Short of resigning to the inevitability of corpulence, one cannot try all the flavors. In particular, I have resisted the temptation to take on Lovecraft’s novels here; even The Case of Charles Dexter Ward alone, with its wealth of raw materials, would require a volume the size of this one to do it justice. For similar reasons, I decided to omit the novella The Shadow Out of Time. Lovecraft’s longer work is represented, however, with a discussion of the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth. Though there is a certain general valuational aspect to choosing texts, my selection here of thirteen stories—a post-structuralist baker’s dozen, a coven of stories—does not imply that pieces not chosen deserve to be neglected. Certainly some of the tales not selected here have a great deal to commend them and could themselves be deconstructed to good effect. My choices, not arbitrary but not possible to defend to every reader’s liking either, simply reflect a realistic assessment of how much it is possible to include and a feeling that certain texts would be uncommonly interesting to work with. A few of the stories chosen have long been considered major Lovecraft pieces from more traditional viewpoints (e.g., The Colour Out of Space and The Dunwich Horror), while a few of the others are stories perhaps less often read, though this consideration alone does not necessarily account for their inclusion or exclusion.

Even with the texts selected, I have practiced of necessity a certain economy. Deconstruction never really ends, never exhausts all possibilities—yet functioning between the covers of a book, one must in fact stop somewhere, at a point at which one feels that a gratifying amount of insight into the open mystery of the texts has emerged.

Even after having read and reread Lovecraft for thirty-five years, I have found the texts newly productive of mystery and wonder upon deconstructive reading. I invite the reader to share the experience.

I would like to thank Arkham House for kindly granting permission to quote from the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

For his help, inspiration, and friendship over the years that I have known him, I would like to thank Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, to whom this volume is dedicated.

Finally, but especially, I extend loving thanks to my wonderful wife, Mollie (a serious Lovecraftian in her own right), for whom, during the trying times of the writing of this book, the post-structuralist notion of absence has, I fear, taken on special meaning.

The Lovecraft stories treated here are found in the three major collections of revised texts published by Arkham House (see Bibliography), and citations in the text will refer to these sources with the following abbreviations:

In each chapter deconstructing a particular story, the appropriate designation will be given once for the source of the text, and further references to the same text will simply provide page numbers.

I should also mention here that all Indo-European roots and other etymological data have been taken from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969) and Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

1. Pre-lude: The Manner of Reading

By the time structuralism, as a school of literary criticism and theory, fully arrived in America in the 1960s by way of translations from the French, it was already in the process of being unsettled, reconsidered and reshaped into a yet newer mode of thinking about literary texts, a mode that has come to be called post-structuralism. The term is a broad umbrella covering a variety of viewpoints, and its relation to its predecessor, classical structuralism, is by no means one of complete separation; post-structuralism is clearly an outgrowth and extension of structuralism. Critical theorist Richard Harland has even coined the term superstructuralism to cover the enormous range of critical and interpretative activity from early scientific structuralism all the way to post-structuralism in its most modern and radical forms. Classical structuralism as a way of thinking has of course spanned many fields, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, as well as literary criticism. In application to literature, the chief methodology of the post-structuralist approach to textual commentary—though it resists being characterized as methodology in the usual sense—is that of deconstruction.

The sort of thinking from which the theory of deconstruction has developed has been with us for longer than is widely believed. Some commentators have found suggestions of deconstructive thought as early as the fifth century B.C., in the writings of Gorgias, and the similarity between some deconstructive attitudes and certain aspects of ancient Eastern philosophy has been noted. But deconstruction has flowered into an intellectual movement from the late 1960s onward due primarily to the impact of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and to the taking up of his banner (carried at various angles) by those critics who have become known as the Yale deconstructionists: Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and (to a lesser degree and with greater reservations) Harold Bloom. Derrida’s founding contributions to the theory owe much to relatively recent philosophical sources, particularly to Friedrich Nietzsche (directly) and to Martin Heidegger (somewhat obliquely). In all respects deconstruction has a way of continuing to seem new, however old its roots. The primary reason, it seems to me, is its radically strange nature—its open courting of paradox, its encouragement of peculiar and seemingly perverse (if rigorous) modes of reading texts. Deconstruction is not the sort of thing with which one can ever fully come to terms. One does not experience a sense of final mastery over deconstruction, does not reduce it to any pat formulaic paradigm. Understanding and coping with deconstruction is a bit like nailing Jello to the wall; some of it sticks, but some of it always slips mockingly away. If it were not so, deconstruction would not be itself, if indeed it is itself, which it would not hesitate to dispute. Deconstruction is an unsettling way of thinking, but, I do not fear to predict, it is here to stay.

Structuralism became post-structuralism essentially because of developments in linguistics—or, rather, changes in attitude toward linguistics as a well-formed science. It is not the purpose here to describe this process of metamorphosis in great detail, but we may note that classical structuralism, especially in its early, scientific style, before it began to shade off into a sort of proto-post-structuralism in the later writings of Roland Barthes, always took the attitude that mastery over language and over textuality was possible—that one could develop, from an adequate theory of language, a fully rigorous methodology for interpreting literary texts, a methodology capable of finding their rock-bottom truths. This expectation, of course, had also been entertained in some earlier schools of criticism, particularly among the old New Critics with their view of the text as organic unity. The idea, for structuralists, was that if literary texts reside in the domain of language—and structuralists and post-structuralists would agree on the point that they do—and if language, through a science of linguistic signs (semiology or semiotics) could be thoroughly and finally understood through making the study genuinely scientific, then so could literary texts. Make linguistics rigorous as a science, and you make textual interpretation and criticism so as well. But it is this premise—the possibility of reducing language to a wholly understandable and controllable discipline, a science of signification—that post-structuralists have called into question.

Language is far more unstable and mysterious, far more given to radical undecidability, far more elusive than has previously been thought.

Literary texts, as objects of scientific or masterfully methodological scrutiny, are surprisingly ill-behaved subjects. As laboratory specimens, they tend to slip off the pins on which we try to impale them, and run free. As conveyors of recoverable, univocal meanings or truths, they are titteringly uncooperative. As examples of figural language at work (and play), they are, in other words, typical.

Since the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, we have understood that language functions essentially through differences. A linguistic signifier is what it is by virtue of its difference from other signifiers. Cat is cat because it is not hat or cot or cab, etc. That is, cat is in a sense the sum of the things that it is not: it contains the trace of those other signifiers with which it contrasts itself to maintain its own form. But where does one stop, in the process of observing such traces? If cat contains the trace of hat, then hat in turn contains the traces of ham and chat. Ham contains the traces of dam and hang; chat contains the traces of chair (which contains the traces of flair and chain and cheer) and that (which contains the traces of than and what and thought), and so on, in endless and labyrinthine branchings into what one begins to glimpse as the sprawling field of language itself, that differential web or network in which texts live. Linguistic signifiers are like sums of differences. Like elements of the quantum field such as the electron, they are defined not in terms of self-presence or self-identity, but in terms of the field in which they are embedded. Indeed the analogy between the field of language and the quantum field of particle physics is rather intriguing. Each field is essentially a relational realm, and each has its undefinable, elusive terms—the linguistic trace to which we have alluded is just as slippery, but just as necessary, as the quark.

A linguistic sign was once thought to be a fairly pat and stable entity, consisting of a signifier together with a signified, or concept-as-meaning. It contained its meaning in an immediate presence that satisfied the notion of Western metaphysics (the metaphysics of presence) that meanings should be directly represented by language—that language should be transparent and should simply express our thoughts about the world. The mode of speech was thought to be the purest such expression, since with speech the speaker is present and the transfer of meaning is presumably immediate. Writing (from Plato onward) was considered secondary, was considered an unfortunate fossilization of speech, was sometimes even considered (e.g., by Rousseau) a dangerous and decadent successor to speech.

But with the modern view of the nature of language, we recognize that, to begin with, the linguistic sign is not the trim little device it once was thought to be, with its meaning nestled inside for ready access. Meanings do not reside in signs, because signifiers point not to signifieds but to other signifiers, which in turn point to still other signifiers, and so on. This is not to say that signifiers are meaningless—this is to say, rather, that meanings are scattered and relational in nature. A meaning does not shine forth as a local phenomenon; it flickers through chains of signifiers, never quite present in any one location. Even the use of spoken signifiers presupposes these semantic circumstances, and there is, accordingly, no privilege of speech over writing. Meanings are dispersed, deferred, always yet to come, in any use of language. Derrida coined the term différance to suggest the never-quite-here nature of meaning. Différance, like trace, is not strictly definable, but has something in it of at least two suggested meanings: differing and deferring.

The implications for reading literary texts are profound. First of all, texts reside in language and must partake of the mystery and complexity that that residence in language implies. We must of course abandon the quaint notion that a literary text has a fixed, single meaning. Such a view would in fact be insulting to the text—it would suggest that somehow the text fails to partake of the richness of the linguistic web in which it finds itself woven. But this is not entirely new with post-structuralist thought. Many previous critical points of view have recognized that texts are plural, or variously interpretable. Such viewpoints have, however, always tended to incorporate, however subliminally, the notion that there is a total meaning present in a text, and that by putting forward various readings, we are simply approximating an access to that meaning, which could be reached and controlled and wholly understood were we but clever enough. What the post-structuralist view of language says, in part, is that the meaning of a text can never be totalized or encapsulated or reached, because the nature of language is such that there are always elements of indeterminacy and is such that texts do not have edges or borders. If we try to enclose a text with borders (Warning: Interpretative reading can never proceed beyond this point.), then the text, whose edges are fuzzy, will overrun the borders and find its own way out into farther regions. Even thinking of texts as being physically limited—This text begins on page 65 and ends on page 85—is artificial. Any piece of writing, in finding its way past our attempted borders out into the field of language, encounters other wandering texts there and interrelates with them. All text becomes intertext. Literary texts dwell in language, and language is intrinsically unstable, polysemic, and everywhere traced through with undecidabilities. It was Nietzsche’s cardinal insight that all language is figural rather than referential—that metaphor operates everywhere, that even the rigorous dialectical language of philosophy is simply rhetoric that has forgotten its own metaphoricity.

We can dispense with authorial intent, a notion belonging to that old metaphysics of presence that would treat language as having self-present and fixed meaning and would treat the text as being a ready access to the author’s mind, a mind unambiguous and all made up as to its intentions. Even if we could suppose we knew the author’s intentions (say, through letters describing them), we would have to ask: Did the author really know them? And even if the author in some sense knew them, do they survive in the writing and rule out all other possibilities? If the author were to provide a line-by-line, word-by-word gloss attempting to forestall all pluralities of interpretation, the gesture would be self-deconstructing. It would amount to an admission that alternative readings must be possible.

The modern view is that a text, once written, is a creature of language and is a public document. As a creature of language, it is something that the author could in no imaginable way have controlled totally. Language precedes the author, and language will survive the author. If the author is articulate, the text will say, presumably, what the author intended—but will always say many other things as well, quite independently of authorial intent or authorial ability at expression. Texts, again, reside in language, and language leads a life of its own. As a public document, the text is ours to read, to help create by reading. Texts, in my view, continue to write themselves by being read. And as Roland Barthes has commented, even the author, like anyone else, can visit the text only as a guest. The author produces a written work, but the work when read becomes text, of which the reader or critic is not merely a consumer but a fellow producer.

Some people have felt that such open textual views by post-structuralists suggest that texts either mean nothing at all or can be made to mean anything (which would be tantamount to meaning nothing). Both suggestions derive from misconceptions. To begin with, texts end up meaning more than we might have thought, not less, when we submit them to the close readings that post-structuralism champions. We do not empty texts of their meaning; we deny only the privilege of univocal meanings to which texts might have been reduced. Full meaning is always deferred, always around some corner yet to come—but meaning deferred is not meaning denied. Yet texts cannot be made to mean just anything, either. They dwell within language, and language, though infinitely sprawling and complex, has form, within which texts function.

But post-structuralism recognizes and highlights the fact that